


We Miss You, Come Back From The War

by somegunemojis



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Sai is so sweet but so so vapid, Spirits, Trans Sai, [cocks gun] water country's haunted, but you don't actually learn anything, self discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:48:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27274450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somegunemojis/pseuds/somegunemojis
Summary: He closes the doors behind him when he leaves.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	We Miss You, Come Back From The War

**Author's Note:**

> sai meets a spirit and that's pretty much it. just a little character insight i suppose.

It takes him five months to get to and back from the far end of the Land of Islands on his mission as a guard for a small caravan of goods and their merchants. The journey would usually take him about four, but he’s waylaid in the Land of Water of all places, just after he crossed over the last ocean straight between the two countries. 

He meets this monk, you see. 

Sai happens upon the old man on accident, which is how the vast majority of his socializing seems to start– the Land of Islands is a mass of, shock of all shocks, Islands, just a little too large to be considered an archipelago but still a series of many dots of land separated by slips of ocean and connected by long stretches of bridges. It’s very flat, very quaint, and very fucking boring. He thinks maybe it’s been days since he’s seen a tree, and he finds he actually misses those more than he misses the company of man, because trees make travel faster, easier, and more subtle, and for now he’s just kind of stuck trotting along alone on the brown sandy dirt of their deeply rutted roads and over their deep strips of ocean via their ugly, rickety bridges. 

It’s over one of those ugly, rickety bridges near the border between Island and Water country that he hears The Commotion. There’s no cursing, just thrashing in the water below– and when he peers over the railing of the bridge, he spots a man waist-deep in the shallows, shirtless, hopelessly tangled in some kind of net and thrashing with his head stuck under water. So of course Sai does whatever any self-respecting samaritan would do: he considers continuing on his way. But no, the man looks pretty stuck; he definitely hasn’t taken a breath in the ten seconds Sai has been watching, so after a moment of deliberation he hops lightly over the railing and lands standing on the surface of the water, reaches down with a kunai and cuts the net and then hauls the man out of the water by his bicep and kind of just holds him in midair, toes just barely hanging in the water. 

It’s shockingly easy. The skinny, shirtless little man weighs almost nothing. Sai’s pretty sure if he tossed him he would easily make it the hundred or so yards to shore. The man coughs and splutters and hacks out water for a moment, thrashing in Sai’s grip before he realizes he is no longer drowning but he is certainly still trapped, and he gives Sai and his crop top and his tanto and his hitai-ate a suspicious look for a moment, still breathing raggedly. 

“Hello,” Sai says pleasantly. 

“You cut the net,” says the funny old man, his voice nasally and a little shrill. 

“Would you rather I let you drown?” The question is butter-mild, and he carefully holds the old man aloft by his arm and carries him to the shoreline before depositing him on solid ground. The old man falls on his ass, struggles out of the remains of the net wrapped around his shoulders and his neck. It is only now that Sai realizes he isn’t _just_ shirtless: he’s quite naked. He watches him struggle with the rope for a few moments more, limbs flopping quite pathetically, before leaning down and stilling him with a touch and cutting the rest of the netting from him. He stares down at the man, and the man looks up at him curiously. 

“Thank you, shinobi-san,” he seems almost reluctant to say it. 

Sai gives him the same plastic smile he reserves for all social situations where he really doesn’t know what to do, and he replies, “you are welcome, naked stranger,” and does not give the man his name. 

He does, however, give the man his traveling cloak and walk beside him on the shoreline where the man had just nearly drowned. The man offers no name of his own and no explanation for his little escapade in the water and Sai doesn’t ask, because he hardly thinks it’s his business what a man gets up to in his free time. Instead the man asks him about any news he’s heard from the world at large, and Sai replies as best he can, having been on the road a while. The old man leads him all the way to a squat house hidden deep in a little inlet, takes him inside, and makes him a cup of dandelion root and kelp tea. He gets dressed as their drinks steep, muttering to himself the whole while. 

He sits across from Sai at the tiny wooden table and up at him, seeming troubled. “You’re a strange one,” is all he can seem to come up with when he finally comments. 

“Am I?” Sai responds absently, lifting the tea to his face and sniffing it, then taking a careful sip. It’s hot and more than a little bitter, but it was made for him and so he will drink it. “I cannot call you naked-stranger any longer, can I?” 

The man shakes his head with a weary sigh and mutters something else under his breath, and then replies, “You may call me monk, if I must call you shinobi. It can be our little charade.”

Sai smiles beatifically at Monk and says only: “Okay.”

Somehow the monk gets him to agree to accompanying him to a temple in the low and ragged cliffs in the north of the Land of Water– _technically_ still on the way back home, though not exactly the swiftest path. He doesn’t think it takes a lot of convincing on the monk’s end. Sai is bored as hell, and at least the old man provides a little life to the dull days of travel. 

The man jabs him in the side once with his fingers, not hard enough to hurt but Sai still flinches from it anyway and the monk laughs at him when he sees Sai had instinctively pulled a kunai out from the sudden movement, but he doesn’t comment on it. The ink dragon that’s sunken into his skin shifts restlessly, peeking out of the collar of his shirt and that passes without comment as well. 

The Land of Islands turns into a series of larger chunks of stone and sand settled into the sea, higher crests, with stubborn plant life in the salty, hot breeze and some jagged columns of rock as they wander into Water Country. The temple that the monk leads him to is– well, he thinks it _might_ qualify as a shrine if they were in Konoha. It’s quite small, with low doorways and made completely of stone. Also, covered in cobwebs. It looks like no one has been here for years. 

“Monk-san,” he begins evenly. “Is this _your_ temple?”

The old man grunts, wrestling the doors at the other end of the little temple open to let in a salt-scented cross-breeze. “As much as anything can be mine,” he responds, and at Sai’s questioning look he elaborates, “I don’t own _anything_ , shinobi-san. Do you?” 

There’s a long pause, because Sai is not sure how to answer that question. Does he? He owns his clothing and his weapons, he supposes. His books. Though technically everything he owns is dedicated to serving the village, so perhaps he owns nothing at all? Perhaps all of his things belong to the people just like he does? Watching the monk watch him offers him no answers on this front. Is it better to own things or to not own them? Perhaps he is simply a thing to be owned? Is that right? He can’t remember, his head hurts, so he cocks his head to the side and asks, “was the home you took the clothes from not yours?”

The man simply says, “not really,” and Sai thinks: _well, fair enough._

Surely the people that lived there would prefer the funny little monk was wandering around clothed. Surely they wouldn't miss one mug's worth of tea. Surely they exist in the first place, and they went there, and accidentally-on-purpose borrowed-from-them without-asking. 

He takes his sandals off and ducks inside, touching his fingers to the smooth stone walls and the writing inscribed in them, fascinated by the vague artwork of some forgotten man, carved into the temple and faded from age. He thinks it’s a story of some sort. When he looks back to the monk, the monk is watching him, brows furrowed. 

“Do you know where you come from, shinobi-san?”

Sai tilts his head, considers, and he says, “Not really.” He was _shaped in_ and he _serves_ Konoha, but beyond that he hasn’t a clue– this has never bothered him before and it doesn’t start now. He simply watches the old man back, blankly. 

A grunt, and then, “Well alright then. Would you like to hear a story?” 

Contemplating this question with as much gravity as the last one, Sai finally decides: _sure, why not?_ He sits when and where the old man gestures for him to do so, and listens as a tale is told. For a monk, he is a very entertaining storyteller, if not one that makes a lot of sense– it begins with a spirit, wise but not too wise, kind but not too kind, building a shelter from the storm. No, he thinks he has it confused, maybe. Perhaps it was the _**storm**_ that came first, an angry god striking out, plucking souls from the ground and the sea with the help of his pack of hunting hounds. And _then_ the not-too-wise and not-too-kind spirit comes in because he doesn’t want any more souls to be stolen, and he builds the people a shelter. 

_Just the one?_ Sai had asked, and the monk had shushed him. He wishes he could have understood the tale better, because it seems like one Kakashi may have liked. You know, because of the hunting dogs. 

The monk pauses, and Sai asks him, “is that it?”

An exasperated look. “ _This_ is the shelter, this temple.”

“Oh,” he says. And then: “Well, it is nice of you to look after it, monk-san. Do you need any help cleaning it up? It seems like it has only been sheltering spiders for a long while.” 

The monk gives him a strange look but acquiesces, getting to his feet and groaning as his bones creak. Sai gets to work, hauling water from the sea and scrubbing the dirt out of the corners with the strange little monk until the musty smell is replaced with salt and the cool breeze. He stays the night in the shelter and listens to the thunder of a sea-storm rumble in the distance and the roar of waves crashing against the shore somewhere below, and he thinks he understands, a little, just where the myth came from. 

The monk is not in the temple when he wakes in the morning, and Sai spends a few minutes sitting and peering at the carved, ancient art on the walls, before reaching into his pouch and pulling out a couple of rounded pieces of sea glass, a feather from a gull, and a couple of crushed prunus flowers and leaving them in a neat pile in the center of the floor. 

He closes the doors behind him when he leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at [hatakayyy.](https://hatakayyy.tumblr.com) if you know any good sai fics please share i love my idiot son


End file.
